Fifty years almost to the day in Los Angeles [July 13, 1960], John Kennedy won the Democratic Party nomination for the U.S. presidency. The rest is history. A lot of it sounds more like the history of porn, now when you examine it with the convenience of hindsight and a rear view mirror.
The Golden Girls? Seinfeld? Batman? The Kennedy White House as it really existed- reckless and unchecked – offered material ripe for sexual parody with orgies in the Lincoln Room, mistresses ushered in and out of the White House by Secret Servicemen in private elevators and the Bloody Mary nude pool parties.
From reading all the accounts, you wonder how the guy had time to run the country. There’s been one report that Kennedy had, on the average, one girl a day to service him during the Thousand Days he was in office. What’s Ron Jeremy’s batting average?
I’m young enough to remember Kennedy running on the doomed Adlai Steven ticket in 1956 as the vice president. Even then Kennedy, a man’s man, had the charisma and oratory which made voters of both sexes swoon. Stevenson did not.
Stevenson was an egghead and dilettante and didn’t connect with the people the way Kennedy did. Kennedy with his thick hair and electric smile were being groomed for much bigger things. Stevenson with his hound dog face and male pattern baldness was already at the end of his political rope.
You’d think Kennedy was Elvis. My grandmother was nuts about him, and I remember my mom hanging JFK portraits all over the living room, and when he was assassinated in 1963, there were candles burning everywhere in the house. Those days of mourning I’ll never forget. Not so much for the pall of national sadness as the betrayal to come.
The first time we really got a glint that Kennedy wasn’t what everyone thought him to be, came when the Church Committee on CIA Assassination Attempts convened in 1975. The Committee was Washington’s answer to an article written a year earlier by NY Times reporter Seymour Hersh detailing a number of covert CIA operations.
Hersh, who broke the My Lai massacre story, would go on to win the Pulitizer and other honors during the course of his investigative career. It was also Hersh who authored the book The Dark Side of Camelot, which is perhaps the most damning indictment of Kennedy and his administration ever written.
Fact is, Hersh got a lot of his dirt on Kennedy from Secret Servicemen who didn’t mind spilling their guts to tell stories about Kennedy’s not-so-secret White House pool parties.
“There were women everywhere,” said Tony Sherman who served on the presidential detail. “There were several of them that were regulator visitors. Not when Jackie was there, however.”
Another story’s told about a local sheriff who brought two girls into the White House for Kennedy and warned them that if they said anything, they’d wind up in a mental institute. Conspiracy theorist David Icke in his book The Biggest Secret tells similar stories about the Clinton administration and claims some women actually wound up in straight jackets when they decided to spill the beans about the Clintonian excesses.
In Hersh’s more pedigreed reporting we’re also introduced to Judith Campbell Exner, former wife of a B-movie actor, presidential mistress and bag lady for the mob. Bag lady not in the sense of a homeless woman but one who ferried cash and bribes between Kennedy and Chicago mobster Sam “Mo Mo” Giancana, alias Sam Flood and about another 19 aliases to go with it.
Exner also had the added distinction of banging both Kennedy and Giancana. With the appearance of Exner on the world stage we got our first bonafide look at the sexual habits and political dealings of a man the world idolized. People chose not to believe then, they choose not to believe now. It’s their privilege.
The strongest argument coming from the Kennedy defense team is why no one knew about any of this, and if they did, why weren’t they talking. The answer, simply is, the press did know, but the press in those days was a different breed of animal.
The same code of conduct applied to sports. The media looked the other way. You had your suspicions because of the infamous Copa incident, but you really didn’t know for sure that Mickey Mantle was seeing double maybe for half of his Major League at bats because of booze and late night carousing with Billy Martin and Whitey Ford.
I remember a Philadelphia Phillies team losing something like 22 or 23 games in a row and only discovering later that most of the team was comprised of functioning alcoholics.
The media or as Hersh likes to refer to them as the “claque of newspaper sycophants” more often than not played ball with the Kennedys and kept a lot of his bedsheet activities strictly on the mum and as shop talk.
Renowned Hollywood columnist Jim Bacon, oft quoted in Hersh’s book, probably said it best : “No one would believe it.”
Besides, members of the press weren’t loathe to being part of the Kennedy inner circle, to bask in the refulgence of his smile and any power that might rub off on them. Many of them were JFK’s social buddies and confidantes. Some of them were pimps including his trusted aide David Powers and unofficially designated White House chief of staff, Kenny O’Donnell [portrayed by Kevin Costner in the film Thirteen Days].
But most of them were on the receiving end of scoops, tips and the munificence of Joe Kennedy’s untold fortune. The main perpetrators of the Kennedy Camelot myth were Ted Sorensen, Theodore White and Arthur Schlesinger. Even they would recant and revise their party lines in later years.
The more you read about JFK, the more you come to understand that he was the Freudian extension of his father’s penis. Old man Kennedy was a bootlegger, master Wall Street manipulator and poon hound, thanks in part to his Hollywood connections. Here’s a good one. When old man Kennedy was named by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC], his comment?
“It takes a thief to catch a thief,” said Kennedy. Now that’s balls.
Kennedy wanted to be just like dad and please him in every way. After all dad’s money was paying the freight for everything including the 1960 election and JFK’s Pulitzer prize, and much earlier, erasure of JFK’s first marriage, an event which got totally and mysteriously wiped off the books. So let’s begin there with the JFK sex legacy.
If we’re to believe what we hear and read, Kennedy had a first marriage which if word, ever got out, threatened his chances at re-election. It became the office scuttlebutt once he got into the White House and something had to be done about it. The woman’s name was Durie Malcolm, and over the years Malcolm, a former athlete and four times divorced [twice before she met JFK], continually played I did, I didn’t media games with the veracity of that story.
Malcolm had been around the block so often there could have been a valid attempt to name a street after her, so we have to believe it’s true. When Joe Kennedy found out about the 1947 nuptials performed by a Florida Justice of the Peace, he had a “hemorrhage”.
But his approach to any problem was always the same- there was none that money couldn’t fix. Of all the speculation over the years, what has given the Malcolm story the most credence and substance were comments made by the late Richard Cardinal Cushing, archbishop of Boston, and the Kennedy family’s spiritual consort. After all, who would know better?
Cushing let the cat out of the bag when he stated in front of witnesses, “Yeah, Kennedy was married before, but it got taken care of.”
What didn’t get taken care of, and something all the Kennedy money couldn’t buy, was the president’s health.
If an assassin’s bullet hadn’t done it, it might have been Addison’s disease [Kennedy was administered last rites on at least four occasions] or one of any number of sexual ailments he was said to be stricken with.
In one liaison on the West Coast, Kennedy pulled a groin muscle and had to be fitted for another brace besides the one he was already wearing for his back condition. It’s been said that the rigidity of having to wear those braces in tandem made him a literal sitting target in Dallas.
Kennedy also suffered from venereal disease for more than 30 years and was repeatedly treated with high doses of antibiotics that included erythromycin, nitrofuran and tetrocycline. Because of his excessive need to fornicate, successful treatment on that score was practically moot and he suffered acute pain while urinating, with occasional mucus. Kennedy also suffered much of his adult life from nongonorrheal urethritis.
Meanwhile, Dr. Max Jacobson, a NY physician, was to Kennedy what Conrad Murray was to Michael Jackson – a combination voodoo practitioner and Dr. Feelgood. Jacobson pumped Kennedy with all kinds of vitamins, some which didn’t even have an alphabet letter, and Kennedy’s comment was, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It’s the only thing that works.”
George Smathers was Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate. On a number of occasions, Kennedy would fly junkets to pre-Castro Cuba during the heyday of the Mob-controlled casinos and hotels. Cuba in those days was a sexually electrified atmosphere of Clark Gable mustaches, cummerbunds and sex; and Kennedy wanted to be very much a part of the action.
In the book, Havana Nocturne, which is as much about Meyer Lansky and his control of the Mob’s business interests in Cuba as anything else, an anecdote is related about the time of Kennedy’s first visit in 1957, after which he’d make his stops routine over the next 18 months.
Kennedy often was accompanied by Smathers, who was friends with Lansky and another Mob heavyweight, Santos Trafficante. Trafficante would later tell people that he arranged a private sex party for Kennedy.
The orgy was apparently set up in a suite with a two-way miror at Trafficante’s Hotel Comodoro, and the mobster arranged for three prostitutes to service Kennedy. The orgy was the main topic of conversation in Havana gossip circles for months mainly because Kennedy presented one side of himself to the public and indulged a darker side, unruffled by the fact that the bad guys were providing him this kind of entertainment.
Trafficante long voiced regret that he never filmed the tryst. Considering Trafficante’s part in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, that would make sense that he’d overlook the obvious.
Smathers, as most red-blooded men probably would, also understood and appreciated Kennedy’s celebrated affair with Marilyn Monroe which was in full bloom by the time the 1960 presidential campaign was under way.
“Everybody knew he liked pretty girls,” said Smathers.
“When he had the opportunity to meet Marilyn Monroe [pictured], he took advantage of it, and got to know her a little bit.”
Which is putting it mildly because that’s where The Mick, the fabled New York Yankees #7 and Kennedy had something in common. There’s a celebrated story about how Mickey Mantle supposedly did Marilyn Monroe in the ass, but that’s to tell another day.
When Monroe, who was considered a “loose cannon” by the Kennedy klatch became a political liability, Smathers was sent to calm her down advising her to put a lid on it. However there was more to it than sex. Gossip columnist Jim Bacon says Monroe was in love with JFK. Would that have been enough to make Monroe a potentially dangerous political commodity to shut up permanently? You be the judge.
And let’s not overlook Frank Sinatra’s part in all these fun and games. Sinatra was an active campaigner for Kennedy and revised his hit song High Hopes to be Kennedy’s 1960 campaign theme. Yet this is not to mitigate the more important fact that Sinatra was also the pimp for many of Kennedy’s adulterous affairs with Hollywood starlets because Frank was only too happy to be a pimp.
I’m convinced that Kennedy wanted to be Sinatra and Sinatra wanted to be Kennedy. Kennedy thrived in the lure of gossip, sleaze and Tinseltown, while Sinatra was a frustrated politician whose mob ties and indiscretions eliminated him from any serious run at office.
Particularly amusing is the fact that Sinatra and Bing Crosby fought like homos over territorial rights to Kennedy and whose house Kennedy would stay at when he was in California. Sinatra finally became the odd man out in that battle when old man Kennedy stepped in and warned the notorious Sinatra to distance himself from Jack. Notwithstanding the fact that it was Sinatra who was called on in the first place to set up meetings with Giancana to deliver Chicago and other mob-controlled wards in the Midwest for Kennedy in the 1960 election.
Even with a move to Crosby headquarters, the orgies didn’t stop. One famous party included naked stewardesses and the California state police.
“Everybody was buck ass naked,” recalls Larry Newman, one of the White House secret servicemen assigned to Kennedy. Newman’s job was to keep the police from busting the party by telling them the noise was coming from coyotes. Adding insult to Crosby’s injury, was a raid on his wardrobe closet, with drunken revelers putting on his suits and diving into the pool. Kennedy paid for the dry cleaning.
Kennedy, by all accounts was a ballsy lover heedless of risks, but his best move from what I can detect came with making one of his mistresses, Pamela Turnure, Jackie Kennedy’s press secretary.
A woman named Florence M. Kater, who had been Turnure’s landlord, threatened to blow the affair out of the water after seeing Kennedy on a number of occasions skulking in and out of Turnure’s apartment late at night. Turnure at the time had been an aide in Kennedy’s senate office, and Kater for all her efforts was played off as a nutcase and discredited, while Kennedy, in turn, gave Turnure the promotion.
Another hot babe in the Kennedy carpool was Alicia Darr. Besides being well known to federal authorities as a high-priced Manhattan prostitute and madam, Darr also found time in her busy schedule to marry several wealthy men including movie actor Edmund Purdom.
Darr first met Kennedy in Boston where she was running a house of ill repute, and there’s stories that Darr was going to spill the beans about the relationship on the eve of the presidential inaugural and that Bobby Kennedy, according to the FBI, was sent as a bag man with $500,000 to shut her mouth.
An equal opportunity shakedown artist, Darr was alleged to have offered the same information to Lyndon Johnson who hated Kennedy. Her fee? $150,000. Bobby Baker, Johnson’s protégé, but also a friend of Kennedy’s, was to be the go-between but elected to tip Kennedy off to the plan.
There’d be hundreds more like Darr and more bags of cash before it was all through. That was the Camelot no one sang about.